It’s as hard as it has ever been leading a team right now. And it’s not just COVID-19 that’s putting leaders under the most intense pressure; COVID has simply added additional force to an already well-established perfect storm. The good news is, there is a chart (or playbook) available to navigate through this storm.

Leaders are constantly encouraged to do all the sexy stuff like execute under pressure, swivel on a sixpence and innovate, but the bedrock of each of these are the more mundane qualities of reliability, organisation and discipline. Singers with a beautiful voice will only get their gigs if they can be trusted to turn up on time. Talented baseball or cricket fielders, with electrically fast and accurate throws, are only going to make the 1st team if they are able to first collect the ball without fumbling it. No matter how talented we are, doing the basics comes first. A talented team is no different. It has to be well-organised, well-disciplined and well-prepared to perform. I call this ‘Getting the team Set’.

We believe leaders have been following a path but for the vast majority, it is an ill-advised path. Several well-known playbooks like Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions model or Tuckman’s forming, norming, storming, performing approach, which is now 50 years old, are either contradicted by recent science, or out of date. There has never been a simple, science based team building code or playbook available to any team leader. Most of the ‘playbooks’ emphasise only parts of what’s required. Others are so complicated they’re just not practical or are not really playbooks at all; they just lay out a load of things that have to be done to build great teams. We felt team leaders need a bit more help than what was being offered. So we set about forming one.

These days’ team leaders are under the most intense pressure. If they had at their disposal a simple, memorable and science based formula or playbook to safeguard the performance of their teams, it would be most timely. After 5 years of reviewing research and based on in-the-field experience, we have devised the TeamUp PlaybookTM. It is measurable, actionable and able to be played by the team, rather than relying on outside forces to be successfully implemented. It contains 4 simple stages for the team leader to work on, in order, with their teams. I describe here these stages together with a recent example from a financial institution of what happens when this Playbook is applied.